When cinema makes you high

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I fucking adore Robert Rodriguez, and his work. One of my favorite movie is Planet Terror for christ sake! You can now imagine my disappointment when watching Sin City: A Dame to Kill, which appeared to be as bad as Sin City was good.

Both Rodriguez and Frank Miller pushed too far the cinematography for this sequel, and except some nice shots worthy of a real B movie, with orgasmic intensity, SCDK is too damn ugly. And this is on behalf of wanting to emphasize too much on the style that conquered the fans’ hearts in 2005. This resulted in a big failure.
They would have done better to do an animated comic of Sin City 2.

The mix of genres; film noir, drama, crime and B movie style, is still very well handled and captivating, along with the strongly stereotyped narration and dialogues, told by gravelly, hoarsely voices. All this put you in a very particular mood of filthy narrow streets and suburban nights, however, they were pushed too far, to the extent where grotesque takes over and makes you mirthlessly laugh.

Also, some scenes combining few objects or characters in color while the rest is in black and white, caused terribly ugly shots, like:

or:

The neo-noir constructed with poker, hookers, light/shadow game, shootouts, even though efficient was sometimes excessively applied; almost with a tone of hyperbolism.

Those elements competed with some unique, priceless scenes, and framings, such as:

And sometimes, sublime experimental ones:

Set in the dystopian streets of Sin City, where violence, filth, and sex are valued or at least preponderant, we follow four stories, somehow related, where characters converge at some point.

We are introduced to new characters.
Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – the other son of Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) wants to prove to his evil father that he can beat him, is better than him, and he’ll use poker to get through Roark. Or, Eva (Eva Green) the femme fatale of this film noir, who charmed Dwight (Josh Brolin) and every man she encounters into getting what she wants. She is magnified by Rodriguez, the actress embodied with talent her vilain character, and is the only good performance of the movie.

Sin City, lost anyway some of its core essence, with A Dame to Kill and in a nutshell, few elements are climaxing, the rest is pretty much ridiculous and the equivalent in value of S.A.S. novels.